Mayor provides Covid health guidance in Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali & Hindi

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has today unveiled a series of videos in which he promotes health guidance on Covid-19 in Urdu, Indian Punjabi, Bengali and Hindi.

The videos have been created to reach South Asian communities in London, who are one of the groups that have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and illustrate the need for more translated health advice across the country.

South Asian Londoners are more likely to be employed as key workers in frontline health and service industry roles, and a study in June suggested that in hospital settings, people from South Asian backgrounds are 20 per cent more likely than white people to die from Covid-19.

The videos highlight the importance of the use of face coverings, observing social distancing and regular handwashing.

Lockdown restrictions have meant major cultural and religious events including Vaisakhi, Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha as well as India and Pakistan’s respective independence days have not been celebrated as they usually would, through communal gatherings. This has meant festivities have largely taken place within households or have inspired families, faith communities and places of worship to move celebrations online.

The videos are the latest in a raft of measures the Mayor has taken to tackle the disproportionate impact of the virus on South Asian communities. These include:

• Successfully lobbying ministers for the routine collection and publishing of demographics of those dying in hospital.
• Calling for ethnicity data to be added to death certificates, urging the Equality and Human Rights Commission to undertake a full inquiry and backing calls on the Prime Minister for an independent public inquiry.
• Calling on the government to make Covid-19 information available in more languages and to dismantle its hostile environment policies which limit migrants’ access to welfare and healthcare.
• Ensuring that staff, including Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff, across the Greater London Authority family have access to Covid-19-focused occupational risk assessments.
• Providing financial support to Doctors of the World to ensure crucial coronavirus guidance could be made available in more than 60 languages and creating a toolkit with resources in a further 11 languages including Bengali and Gujarati.
• Offering targeted health guidance, through social media, aimed at Londoners for whom English is a second language.
• Meeting virtually with community leaders including representatives of the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh faiths to gain a deeper understanding of how best to provide support.
• Promoting the launch of South Asian Heritage month which took place this summer.
• Helping to launch the London Community Response which has given emergency funding to a number of organisations rooted in the capital’s South Asian community including Hounslow Multicultural Centre and Hopscotch Asian Women’s Centre. Of the £23million allocated by the fund so far, 44 percent has gone to BAME led organisations.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan said: “From key workers on the frontline to families staying home, London’s South Asian communities have made extraordinary sacrifices to help stop the spread of this virus.

“We know that Covid-19 has disproportionately affected South Asian Londoners and yet, at a time when access to clear and accurate information is more important than ever, this Government is failing them.

“A person’s ethnicity should never mean the difference between life and death and Ministers must do more to ensure reliable guidance in accessible formats is available to all.”

Dr Sarah N Ali, South Asian Health Foundation (SAHF) trustee and Consultant in Diabetes and Endocrinology, said: “SAHF has been active for two decades working to improve health inequalities in the British South Asian community based on robust scientific research and evidence-based medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted these health inequalities, suggesting greater risk of severe illness from COVID-19 infection in Black and South Asian communities. SAHF continues to work to strengthen the science and reduce health inequalities, and resources such as these – providing clear, accurate, culturally tailored advice – are useful to support the work we do for our communities.”

Benaifer Bandhari, CEO - Hopscotch Asian Women’s Centre, said: “At Hopscotch we have worked on accurate information from the beginning of enforced isolation - particularly for our more vulnerable service users facing poverty, domestic abuse and loneliness. With our colleagues at Camden we have made videos in community languages throughout this period but having London-wide videos to share is fantastic and will mean a lot to our service users and staff.”